We hope you will find many of your questions answered here.

International Questions

1.How can I get back to the search homepage in English?

2.How can I improve the accuracy or number of results when searching for foreign words?

3.Why do you not offer more language choices?

Search Questions
1.How do I search within results?

2.How can I restrict my search?

3.How do I stop my previous searches from appearing when I type in a new search term?

4.How can I set the default number of hits to 100?

Webmaster Questions

1.What is cloaking?

2.Do I need to submit updated and/or outdated links and pages?

3.How do I submit multiple pages?

4.Why doesn't your search index any of my pages?

5.What is the amount of time it takes to index a URL once it is submitted?

6.Where is my page's title?

 

International Questions

1. How can I get back to the search homepage in English?

You can access the standard homepage by clicking on the "Search in English" link. If this does not work, your browser is probably not configured to accept cookies.

If you want to change your search interface language without changing your browser's accept-language preferences, you can set your language preferences manually in our "Preference" page. However, setting language preferences this way does require that cookies be enabled; the accept-language behaviour does not.

2. How can I improve the accuracy or number of results when searching for foreign words?

The search technology is sensitive to the precise spelling of foreign words. Spelling the word correctly with the appropriate foreign characters will significantly improve the quality of your search results as well as the number of hits. For instructions on typing foreign characters with an English or any other keyboard, visit the following page for instructions: http://www.umass.edu/langctr/keyboardhelp.html.

3. Why do you not offer more language choices?

We continually add to our list of languages. Stay tuned!

Search Questions

1. How do I search within results?

Sometimes a search is in the right area but gives too many results. To narrow the results down, you might want to do a new search that searches only within the URLs returned by the too-broad search query. This is often called "narrowing a search" or "searching within the current search results." Our search makes this process easy. Since only web pages that contain all the words in your query are returned, to narrow a search all you need to do is add more words to the end of your query. This gives you a new query that will return a subset of the pages returned by the too-broad query. You can also exclude a word by putting the "-" operator immediately in front of the undesirable term.

2. How can I restrict my search to specific extensions, e.g., .ie?

Some words, when followed by a colon, have special meaning in our search. One such word is the "site:" operator. To search a specific domain or site, use the "site:sampledomain.com" syntax in the search box.

For example, to find information on cars in oceanfree.net's site, enter:



If you would like to search for information on cars within Irish domains, enter:



3. How do I stop my previous searches from appearing when I type in a new search term?

Fortunately (and unfortunately), this has nothing to do with search. It's a feature of Internet Explorer 5.x, which is possible to disable using its menu. (You can verify this by going elsewhere on the web to fill out a form and then return to that same page on which you filled out the form.) To disable this feature on Internet Explorer 5.x, go to the Tools menu; select Internet Options; select the Content tab. Within the Personal, select AutoComplete. Click on Clear Forms. You can also uncheck the Forms box in this same window to keep this from occurring in the future. Alternatively, you can delete individual entries from the history by using the Down arrow key to select a previous search, and then pressing Delete while an unwanted search is highlighted.

4. How can I set the default number of hits to 100?

The default search (10 results) provides the fastest results. However if you know that you always want more than 10 results, you can visit our Preferences page and set the number of results to 20, 30, 50, or 100. You will get your chosen number of results for every search.

If you would just like to see more results on a per query basis, you can change the number of results when you search from our Advanced Search page.

Webmaster Questions

1. What is cloaking?

When "cloaking," a website returns altered web pages to a search engine accessing the site. That is, the webserver is programmed to return different content than it normally returns to regular users, usually in an attempt to distort search engine rankings. This can mislead users about what they will find when they click on a search result. To preserve the accuracy and quality of our search results, any site(s) or authors may be permanently banned from our index if cloaking is engaged in to distort their search rankings.

2. Do I need to submit updated and/or outdated links and pages?

The index is updated as often as necessary, so updated or outdated link submissions are not necessary. We should be able to pick them up during each crawl.

3. How do I submit multiple pages?

Please visit our Add URL page to input your URLs. Only the top-level page from a host is necessary; you do not need to submit each individual page. Our crawler will be able to find the rest!

4. Why doesn't your search index any of my pages?

Pages that have not been indexed yet probably haven't because not enough other pages on the web link to them -- if other pages don't link to them, we can't assign them a PageRank (our proprietary measure of a page's importance) in a reasonable way. Once other links point to them, we'll pick them up. The search crawler looks at the link interconnectedness among pages and allows the open, vast nature of the Internet to yield the most relevant search results.

5. What is the amount of time it takes to index a URL once it is submitted? Depending on the timing of the submission and our crawl, the entire process can be anywhere from one to four weeks. Note, by submitting your URL we cannot guarantee listing on the database.

6. Where is my page's title?

Unlike many search engines, we can return results even if it has not yet crawled that page. Pages that are known but haven't been crawled can be returned as results, but since we have not yet looked at them, their titles aren't shown -- instead, the URL is shown.